Essential Fintech Reading: April 1 - 8

American Banker's Bryan Yurcan gives highlights from Jamie Dimon's latest letter to shareholders wherein Dimon tells why big data represents a key point in the future of banking. Yurcan writes, "On the consumer side, the company is using big data to deliver more targeted marketing and understanding why customers leave the bank. That perhaps seems like an obvious use of such capabilities, but it is a significant undertaking given that its Chase Bank unit — one of the nation's largest mortgage, credit card and automobile lenders — has a relationship with nearly half the households in the U.S."

Chris Skinner talks about the options traditional banks have when it comes to dealing with fintech companies, and he asks whether they can work together. "All those attractive fintech start-ups may appear tempting, but there is no consensus among the big beasts on the best way to get a piece of the action. Some banks, such as Santander, National Bank of Australia and Citigroup, are providing venture funding and seed investments for fintechs. Others, such as Barclays, Bank of America, and Sberbank, are creating or partnering with start-up incubator programmes. Others still, like Spain’s BBVA, are simply buying them up."

The NYT's Andrew Ross Sorkin wonders whether fintech companies will succeed in disrupting traditional banks or whether banks will just absorb them. "If they succeed," he writes, "Wall Street as we know it may become an outpost of Palo Alto. According to a Citigroup report last week, fintech may be on the cusp of an “Uber moment,” as Antony Jenkins, the former chief executive of Barclays, predicted last year. Some 800,000 people will have lost their jobs at financial services companies to some of the newly dreamed up software in a decade." Based on these numbers, it's clear the changes in financial services aren't about to slow down.

Number26 represents one of the hopeful disruptors Andrew Ross Sorkin and Chris Skinner write about above. In an interview with Oscar Williams-Grut of Business Insider, Numbers26 co-founder and CEO, Valentin Stalf, says that he's prepared to take banking to the next level. "What we’ve been doing is banking as it should be in 2015 and 2016. We try to reimagine how a bank should work and we tried to build something that is like using Uber or Spotify or any of these apps you love to use. We said first it should be mobile and secondly, if you use it, it shouldn’t be something that you hate." While doubling their total customers in 5 months is phenomenal, time will tell if companies like Number26 have staying power. At the very least, they're causing banks and credit unions to feel pressure and get digital.